27/07/17

Release notes for 27th July 2017 (1.7.0):

Sales

Feature: Enquiry Form - Rate Selection - The rate selection box has been changed from a drop down to a multi select similar to the Unit Type box. This means you can now select one or more rates to search for not just one or best available.

Feature: Enquiry Form - Default rate Selection - You can now set via Admin settings what the default rate or rates you want to use. The default is set via Admin - System Configurations - Booking tab. You can select if you want it always to be best available rate (tick box) or if you want to select one or more rates to be your default. Once selected and saved when you start a new enquiry these rates will be selected in the rate box automatically each time.

Improvement: Booking - Emails - When creating a new email the default to: address is now taken from the 'Send Emails to' preference that is set in the booking. i.e. so if it is set to 'Booking Contact' then the to: will be set to the email address of the booking contact on the booking, if it is set to 'Booking Contact & Guest' then the to: field will be set to the first guest's email address.

Improvement: Sales - All Bookings - This view now shows a guest name column that allows you to search by guest name to find a booking.

Improvement: Sales - Booking View - When selecting a room stay in the booking view you see the Rate that the room stay is on in the room stay details. This now shows the rate id prepended to the short rate name i.e. C7:AS Std 1B 28-89nts POB. This is possible because we now enforce unique rate codes. This helps track down the exact rate the room stay is using.

Improvement: Sales - Booking Amend - When moving a room stay between Units that results in a change of Unit Type i.e when moving a room stay between buildings you are warned and asked to confirm you want to go ahead. This warning is provided because a move of this nature almost certainly requires manual invoice changes, for example you may have moved between a VAT and a non VAT building.

Improvement: Channel - Commission - Channel now includes a box to state if it is commisonable or not, if it is commissionable then you must select a company, commission type and commission %.

Fix: Booking - Take Payment - The credit card drop down box sometimes required two clicks to select the card, this is now fixed.

Operations

Feature: Operations - Auto Checkin - Late bookings that are for arrival today but booked after the standard checkin time i,e 3pm are currently auto-checked in straight away. As a result they no longer appear in the Service Delivery Centre arrivals tab as an arrival today they just show in the in-house guest tab. In order to help with this we are introducing an auto-checkin time for late bookings. So if a booking is added for today and its after the standard checkin time it will not auto checkin the stay but wait until the late booking auto-checkin time then check it in. Example: standard checkin time is 3pm, booking is taken at 4pm for arrival today, late checkin time is 6pm. The stay will be auto checked in at 6pm today. This late auto-checkin time can be set in Admin - System Configuration under the booking tab.

Improvement: Operations - Auto Checkin - The standard auto-checkin process has been changed to run every 5 mins rather than just at your standard ETA checkin time. So previously if your standard checkin time was 3pm then all booking due today would be auto checked in at 3pm. With this improvement it will auto checkin every 5 mins all bookings where the ETA time has been reached. So if a booking is set for an early checkin at 2pm it will auto-checkin at 2pm.

Improvement: Operations - Key Management - You can now checkout keys to 'other' and select a contact or company from the CRM. So you could check out a Maintenance key to Pimlico Plumbers.

Improvement: Operations - Key Management - You now have to specify a return date for each key you checkout - This will be auto set to the checkout date of the room stay when done through the Service Delivery Centre. If you are manually checking out a key via Operations - Keys then you can select the room stays that is currently or about to be in the Unit you are checking out a key for.

Improvement: Operations - Service Delivery Centre - When selecting dates and moving between tabs within the Service Delivery Centre your date selection is remembered so you don't have to start again each time.

Improvement: Activities - When creating a new activity it now opens in a new tab rather than a popup which allows you to do other tasks and return to your new activity to complete it.

Improvement: Activities - When creating an activity that blocks availability it now does a check for room stays already in that Unit and doesn't allow you to add a blocking activity if a room stay already has a booking for the same date period.

Property

Feature: Property - Unit Contracts - You can now specify a fixed fee for a Unit Contract i.e. £150 a month

Feature: Property - Unit Contracts - You can now specify a fixed fee & % fee and it will use whichever is greater to calculate commission on a Unit Contract. i.e. 20% commission, fixed fee per month of £150. 1 booking this month for £500 @ 20% = £100. Therefore this month the landlord would be charged £150.

Improvement: Property - Unit Contracts - You can now name each of your unit contracts i.e Mr Smith the Landlord Contract

Finance

Feature:

Improvement: Finance - eInvoice - The eInvoices sent screen now calculates all allocations against an invoice to show total outstanding and not just payments made via eInvoice.

Improvement: Finance - Due Payments - Additional columns have been added to show the Charge from & Charge to of the invoice (note if the invoice has multiple line items it will be the earliest charge from and the latest charge to used). These columns are not shown by defaults, you can turn them on in Admin - Systems Configuration - Views tab

Reporting:

Feature: Reports - Finance - Client Account Statement - This new report allows you to select a finance account and get a balance for that account between two dates. The report shows sales invoices, sales credits, purchase invoices, purchase credits and payments for each account.

Feature: Reports - Finance - Cash Booking Reconciliation by Building - This new report is identical to the other cash reconciliation reports it just shows it grouped by building.

Improvement: Reports - KPI's - Rate Report - An original rate column has been added so you can see that the rate was £120 a night but the booking was taken at £110 a night.

Improvement: Reports - Finance - Sales log by booking/ Account/ Nominal Codes (Invoice Values) - This report has been changed so it can handle larger amounts of data. it will now show you monthly values only between the period selected for the report. The previous report would show you data for the full length of a stay even if it started before or went on after the period you had selected. i.e. you were looking at Jan - Mar 2017 but had a stay that started in Jan 17 and went through to Jan 2018 it would show you every month through to Jan 18 in the report. The effect of this change is you can now look at a full 12-month period.

Improvement: Reports - Sales - Account performance by booking & Booker performance reports have been both split into two reports. You now have a by Enquiry & a by Booking for each of the reports. This was done to reduce the confusion of having both Enquiries & Bookings in a single report. We have also allowed you to filter by Cancelled & Booked to reduce confusion as the original report included bookings that were booked but subsequently cancelled. Bookings that were cancelled now shows in the Type column so if you do add Cancelled as a filter you can see which bookings were subsequently cancelled.

Online

Feature: Channels - Channel Mappings - Under Admin - Channel Settings is a new menu option called Channel Mappings. This is used to map an online channel to a ReRum channel so new booking are auto set to the correct channel. i.e. You receive a booking via either Rentals United or Siteminder from Booking.com you want that to show as channel Booking.com in ReRum. Each channel has a unique code passed to ReRum from the channel manager to allow us to identify it. A list of channel ID's is available in the help system.